The aim of this research is to contribute to an increased understanding of the factors that influence the engagement and meaning-making of pupils in first grade (age 6) when they encounter educational screen texts during preliminary reading and writing instruction. The focus of the study is on how the content, form and use of these educational texts influences the educational aims and eventual creation of meaning by the children within the classroom environment.

This classroom study takes a qualitative methodological approach, inspired by ethnographic and narrative methods. The empirical data consists of two educational screen texts, observations of six pupils' use of the screen texts within a station teaching context, (a method where children move around the classroom from teaching centre to teaching centre as the lesson progresses), and interviews with teachers and pupils in the relevant class.

The study follows the two educational screen texts over three phases, referred to as creation, adaption and usage phases and utilises an adaptation-theoretical approach, which in the third phase aims to highlight the way the children both adapt to the requirements of the texts and adapt the texts to their own needs and qualifications.

Hermeneutics feature at all levels of the study, both in the interpretation and comprehension of the empirical data and within the pupils' use of educational texts. This analysis is contextualised within a social framework which sets the conditions for both those involved in the study and the study itself, i.e. that the study is also based on a socio-cultural view of text, education and human actions.

One of the main findings of the study is that first year pupils are motivated to learn and that they engage and make meaning with educational screen texts, even when these appear to be rather meaningless; which is often due to the situational context. Although the screen texts could be assessed as meaningless the pupils' reading is to an extent meaningful.

A second finding focuses on the different requirements that educational screen texts can place on the teacher's ability to adapt and use them as a tool to support the classes learning aim. Despite the text authors’ aims when writing the texts, teachers have to use them in such a way that pupils will be able to create meaning and learn as they interact with the texts. Although it could be suggested that the teachers ability to adapt and adopt texts in a meaningful way would be an obvious requirement before such an educational approach, this study discovered that this is not necessarily taken into account in practice.

Other findings point to the importance of the external design (or form) of the educational screen texts that may have greater significance in the creation of meaning than the actual content and that the way in which teaching is organised can be as important a quality as the content and educational aims when selecting and using screen texts.